Category: Trends

“While email worms occupy the top spots, it’s clear that Trojans represent by far the most prominent threat to IT security,” said Carole Theriault, senior security consultant at Sophos.

Netsky is still the most common virus seen online, accounting for about one in five of all viruses despite a fix and removal tools being widely available for more than two years.

“The expected reign of IM worms has not arrived because virus authors are confronted with a fundamental barrier when engineering an IM worm,” stated Fortinet’s report. “While email addresses are easy to collect on the web, instant messaging IDs are generally less public, making the seeding process significantly harder to set up.”

http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2155151/viruses-longer-top-threat-april

“I think some people were still scratching their heads when we bought Authentica, but certainly not our customers,” said Dennis Hoffman, EMC’s vice president of information security for EMC, based in Hopkinton, Mass. “Customers are asking all the major platform providers to build security into their technologies, and we will absolutely invest, partner and when possible, acquire, to continue to build out information security in our own products.”

Hoffman said enterprises will likely always seek some form of help from independent, third-party security applications vendors, but that he believes end users have tired of the need to acquire additional technologies for protecting almost every form of IT.

Some analysts are predicting that the trend toward large IT platform providers developing greater security features will only accelerate a torrent of industry consolidation among anti-malware and network defense applications makers that could already be overdue.

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1956656,00.asp?kc=EWRSS03119TX1K0000594

‘Build your own spyware’ kits are already commonplace on the internet in publicly available forums, leading to fears that ‘script kiddies’, technically unsophisticated users, could develop and distribute their own malware.

http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2154824/spyware-evolving-faster-viruses

Novell announced Suse Linux Enterprise 10 at its Brainshare conference last month. Earlier the same month, at Cebit in Hanover, it announced its Enterprise Linux Desktop.
The aim is to give business users a desktop that does not require them to be Linux buffs, says Hovsepian. And also to add the functions that the business user expects from a proprietary operating system such as Windows.

“We have focused on interoperability, interfacing it with common directories like Active Directory and e-directory,” he says. Novell has transferred some of the macros from Excel to Open Office, easing transition. “We’ve focused on usability”, conducting focus groups through www.betterdesktop.org to identify problems for the typical user in Linux’s Gnome and KDE GUIs, says Hovsepian.Novell has sold security and identity management software, such as Novell Identity Manager, eDirectory and SecureLogin, for a number of years.

http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/0/700D16BCCD690C4DCC257157000CDF5B?OpenDocument

Respondents were invited to mark which technologies they considered to be most important to their organization and about the motivation behind their selection.

It was found that 47% of IT projects are motivated by the need either to increase user productivity or to improve the competitiveness of the organization.

http://www.datamonitor.com/~70e44069658744acbaf25701b82915f0~/industries/news/article/?pid=9072DB56-9162-46A9-AC5A-5130290D0BDB&type=ExpertView

Considering that both authentication technologies modify current e-mail practices in some way, that’s solid progress, said Craig Spiezle, director of the technology care and safety group at Microsoft and the chairman of Wednesday’s E-mail Authentication Summit.

“This is like the telephone problem–no one wants to have the first one,” said Eric Allman, chief science officer for e-mail server software maker Sendmail.

E-mail authentication does not solve the problem of unsolicited commercial e-mail but provides a tool to end the spoofing of the sender’s address, making the consequences of sending bulk e-mail a reality for spammers. The two major proposals solve the problem in different ways. In fact, early studies of junk mail in 2004 found that nearly a sixth used the Sender Policy Framework, the predecessor to Sender ID, to appear legitimate. However, as more legitimate domains are adopting the technologies, companies are developing reputation systems to evaluate which domains are considered “spammy” and which deliver content that people want in their inboxes.

“Authentication is a really big building block in terms of making a more intelligent determination of what is spam and what is not,” said Ken Schneider, chief archtect for Symantec and former chief technology officer e-mail security provider Brightmail.

http://www.securityfocus.com/news/11388?ref=rss